And so I'm back.

Wow. What an...interesting...last few weeks. I write this from my room in Edinburgh, back in the land o' kilts and haggis, stricken with what is either the plague or bronchitis, and with more disastrous air travel under my belt than Amelia Earhart. The flights back actually went fairly smoothly, though I was worried UK border control would turn me away as a health risk; I held my breath and my coughing as much as possible during my interview, which may have made me come off as a bit of a weirdo, but not an immediate threat to public safety. Yay!

It was very strange travelling back from the Edinburgh airport this second time. Last September, I had left behind everyone I knew and loved, everything I knew and depended on, for a complete unknown. This time, I knew more of the incidentals--the city, the people I would be seeing later in the evening, where to go to get food--but I don't feel any more secure in my knowledge of the bigger things. I still don't know if I've made the right long-term choice in coming here, or how I'm going to do in the course of this program and my (supposed) future path, or what I even want to pass by and pass up on that path. In a way, it has been more discomfiting to realize that I still don't have the intimations of answers to these questions now than before; it seems inappropriate, somehow, and simultaneously self-serving and sacrificing not to have figured it out by now. I do know that I am happier now than I was before, but I wonder if maybe that is just the temporary contentment of pampering, if I'm not engaging in a sort of intellectual spa treatment before returning to my real and, ultimately, unavoidably dissatisfying life.

Still, it's good to be back in the mud-wrap of academia. My first class of the semester was auspiciously cancelled (auspicious both sarcastically and sincerely, because this class is taught through the law department and I am terrified of failing, in some broad and as-yet undefined way), and my second class "taught" by the king of the pedants, the aforementioned bane of my scholarly existence. That's unfair. I don't actually take him seriously enough for him to be a bane. Appropriately, he has apparently decided to take the same approach to me, and I realized over the course of the class that his new method of dealing with my unsuppressed disdain will be to let me say my piece and then immediately change the subject. We'll just see about that.

Now I have 600 pages of reading to do over the next thirty hours, and (seemingly) thirty hours of jet-lag for which to compensate. The realities of this equation have already begun to manifest themselves, as, in the last five hours, I've managed to read twenty pages without remembering any of it, take a four hour nap and eat a sandwich. This seems...less than commendable.

Here ends the blog post. I do solemnly swear to be better about 1) posting in general and 2) posting things that will be of greater interest to people who aren't me. After this one.